Thursday, February 1, 2007

Who would have thought something that was born on a dark and stormy night could turn out to be as warm as a pair of flannel pajamas. But that’s exactly what’s happen. In fact, CSR has begun to crawl. It’s so heartwarming to watch it pull itself up by the desk leg where my laptop sits and longingly gaze at the chair in front of it as if imaging how comfortable it would be to sit there. The bald-headed bundle of joy has already learned not to eat poetry contests and pushes away any unsolicited manuscripts because of the tremendous response to the “subs by invitation only”, a concept its single parent came up with after just one shock treatment. And because it’s so cute and cuddly both national and international artist bend down on one knee to tickle its cheek. The February issue will showcase a few of them. And guess what, you don’t have to like infants to like CSR. On the other hand, what kind of person doesn’t like a baby! So either sit back and read this second issue or I’ll have you hand wash a whole week’s worth of soiled diapers. And I won’t even offer you hand lotion when you’re done. Now, get to reading…

Cohorts in formica, tin and twang, compromisingat used and rigid overtures, the red the liddedaplomb tinged like lipped margins, anchored andthinned, parched above whispers, a ratchetedbearing that sucks the ashen order of canopy,left to lift and dive.

Sometimes a strange, sometimes an accordionfor a kiss, and sometimes the sky rounding outthe mouth.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet,Roy G Biv twists through myriad prisms.Slow wavering is red, a fast flutter is violet,and sandwiched between infra and ultra,between radio waves and cosmic raysis our wafer of visibility.Bees see ultra violet and vipers sense infra redand we stumble in between,blind as a bat to most of the universe.Yet it’s neither bee nor viper nor even bat but only wewho discern the segue shades of gray.

Minute Hope, Hourly Desire

Years ago the hours and minutes stopped somewhere between 12 and 12.The glass was too scratched to see exactly where,and he was too drunk to care precisely when.But he has rewound, tightened hi metaphorical main spring.No longer a panhandler,he seeks to measure his remaining timewith blinking hours, minutes, and secondsor the graceful sweep of watch hands.Then passersby instead of pretending to look awaywill approach and ask nothing from them.A panhandler measures daysby meal to meal, drink to drink, fix to fix,or bankruptcy to bankruptcy.Yet he’s been sober long enough,and earned and saved almost enoughfor that digital Casio in the drugstore display case.A Rolex remains a distant dream.But he rubs his still naked wrist, and hopes.

Blanket Existence

Cerebral cortex,Defined by Webster’s unabridged as a superficial overlay.A layer of neural gray cells, a wispy membrane rousinga dream-walking being into self-awareness.For when the frog doesn’t even know it exists,likewise the frog in the jaws of a snake.Or the snake in the talons of a hawk.But we can ask why, judge right form wrong,dream, know we’re dreaming, and fulfill those dreams.All the threads that weave an immortal soulrest in a mortal meshwork blanket-thin.

Cloudy New Year’s Morning

Surely last year she left someone or someone left her,the way she sits on the bench by the 69th street pier,Slowly tossing crumpled bread to the gulls.She even tires feeding the manna form her open palms,but the feathered Israelites refuse her handheld charity,preferring to peck on the ground.

Thus with downcast eyes and slumping postureshe anoints herself the center of the gull’s attentionand so I move toward her.And what am I doing here this cloudy New Year’s morning?We two alone together on a pier so desertedthat even the daily fisherman are absent.I walk past her and instead of happy new year,I blurt, “It will be better this year”.And she raises her head and we’re eye-to-eye.And I stop. And I hope; and I hope.But her eyes whisper, “Thanks, but please move on”.And so I leave, through a flock of grounded gullsnot yet ready to resume soaring.

The Book Of Eternal Life

The book of eternal life is a telephone book.An updated edition arrives each year.A divinely diligent editorskims across cheap, thin papererasing older names, inserting newer onesand reshuffling the numbers.Here in the attic I found an eighty-year-old phone book.And if I were to dial the number for any name,I’d get a wrong number, dead airor a notice of disconnection.It’s Life that’s eternal, not lives.

The voracious season has comewith its wrinkled bark and nakedness,when the vegetative slumber of winterovercomes you.And in the doze before true sleepyou imagine the difference of squirrels.You dream your leaves are done forand dying into the dirt at your feet.A storm blows down your extra fingers.This is the frightening monumentbefore the deep dreaming overtakes you,when you can still scent the faint songof autumn. You press your roots to earth.You pretend you are not paralyzedwith the inevitable,But growing fascination with languorovercomes your plaited sorrow.The sleep huddled in your highest branchstretches its leaves and falls on you like a blanket,warms your fears just in time for snow.

This morning you calledlong before the sky slippedon her sunrise skirt:early stars blinked quietlythe way a heart beatsbeneath the covers of sleep.When the phone rangthe whole houseseized awake.She died in the night,was the first thing you said.I listened to you describeher fall, nodded my griefinto a phone gone suddenlyhard and cold.You didn’t hear her go.You couldn’t have knownhow you’d sewn guiltinto your end of the conversation,scratchy and strange the waya mended sheet rubson a bare foot at dawn.By the time my bed was made,clouds shrouded the sky’s face.When I started the car,rain had already stainedthe road dark and wet.

This time the wooded mountain gave up words. Wild,unbridled verbs thickened the air.Noun feathered the ground. It was clearthe leaves were distressed, by the harshness,the unveiling, as if secrets and beliefwere meant to hide forever. No one knowshow the trees’ bark peeled, how to distinguishthe truth among so many naked trunks. Versionsdiffer. Too many adjectives were lost, What isdisaster, anyway? Words can only describe sorrow.

She’s been opened like unraveled rope,felt fall make room for snow, become undoneas if the world had peeled her hands apart.She knows she’s bare again at thirty-five.With snow outside it’s now too late learnthe reason why leaves turn and fall to dustfrom trees as silent as the barren ground.

A boyseen in the lamp's refulgenceenduringhis father’s base criticismfocuseson the private placewhere he dwells alonevoluptuously alone.He readsthe voice pleads his mother keeps her mouth shutno apostrophe with swearshis father glares in rage appeals to his wife.The boy rehearses his lifeas if he senses the road aheadconjures a blanket of rainto cushion soundand sweeten the atmosphereturns another pageyearns for those other worldsstrains to unmask the future.He switches his focus to that rainswells it to a delugea freak floodseizes the voiceits bleak cry of distressholds it underuntil it is drowned.

Hamstrung

The boy’s imagination meandersaway from organized gamestheir rituals their monotony.He carries home on the sweaty busan enriched account of school sportsthe drama of his participationhis sacrifice of mind and bodystraining to reach the finishdespite his wavering interest.

His father’s imaginationduring the trek of marital sexhas stretched like perished elasticstranding him limp and bereft.This father sighing for a false pasttunes in to their son’s complainta nagging twinge sufferedin the long run up the final straight.The boy points to the back of his legask his mother, surely notthe same girl his father married,Mum, is this your G-string?

There’s No Going Back

The aspirations of childhood.We know what their horoscope says.A boy, his dreams of gold despite his blood,grows up to spend driven daystracing his family like a private eyeof crime fiction, aunts, uncles, misfits,battered, scattered, their history a cryin the overhanging night, a clan kinghit.

Through public records and heartrendingtales, he finds them by burrowing back.All that is missing is a happy ending.He sees the scene, hears a soundtrack,a reunion with strings or pan flute.He sends his story to LWTV,convinces a man in a suitto fly his parents for a surprise party.

The ratings zoom, with stifled sobs on cue.Later, their crowd loud in a London hotel,our man, his golden dream come true,musters his old mum, urges her to revealhow she feels, now, with her sister again.He wonders if she understands what he didto bring this pack together, past pain.His mum responds: She still owes me ten quid!

When blinking at Christ is another chore,it helps to draw a laundry list of kneeling.

Dragging ass to kiss the grail, ichorspuddles our scalps, slows the procession.Day pass in the ripple. Feminine lengthsmetastasize. Hammocks swing their bonesin a thong of lichen, teasing until the crabtrees finally cater and weep a violence of fruit.

For all occasions in which we refuse to self-destruct,let us then claim “accidents of judgment”, and,pious, recall how magistrates housetheir tans in the lipstick sundown.these garden monuments liquefy diurnally,holocaust shade waxed ear to ear.

Aerobics DVDs bombard skid row,jutting lectures at the wine tangledmanes of the almost dead.“You’re doing great!Remember to check your pulse”.Cackles enlighten the alleyway.A pant leg is liftedso the rats can crawl home.

Night after bed sick night,a homecoming for every wrinkle,grandmothers fumble out stains of granite.We braid our kindness into their stretches,paramedics glue more smiles on,it is the only weapon left,and it trigger’s greased.

First Date(from fuckscapes - first published in Ink Stains)

She came overwearing just an umbrella

we shaved our headsand rubbed them together

the sparks formed little swastikasromance was in the air

I pinned back her clitoralhood with six tooth picks

when she said uncleI tied myself into a knot

I can break eggsin ways you’d never thinkshe said

and I felt my tearsflow as the lights went

down and the newsreelfootage beganspinningand spinning

Victim logy(Part 2 - The Fashionably Dead)

“Time destroys all things”-Gasper NoeI was delivered, hands at three and nine, a wrist-watch Christ,guilty for Coca-Cola, the cock teaser billboards toweringover Projects nationwide, Mickey Mouse with allhis rectal sutures combed loose in the overhead--that was the influence of my birth.

I am killed by shrugging post-dinner walks.Stuck dead by a welfare influenza that perhaps, ironically,I first sneezed. After all, how many times haveI been caught laying my silver elbows on the windowsighing my slurs at the newspaper?

It really pinches, muting one’s life to commerce.

On the sidewalk, as he pounds it in,think what a miserable story I can peddlelike sympathy’s prostitute. I need this,a new excuse for breathing. I will live from shoulderto shoulder. Break down while using a tampon.My friends, purpled by varicose gossip,trays of cow like red mirrors in the kitchen,fiddling loose their jealousies, and my husband,a stronger dose needed to lift his eyes to mine,share the pills--so I can stuff them into my wound,but nothing will shrink me back to scale.

The Louvre Pyramid is the large metal and glass pyramid which serves as the main entrance to the catacombs and has become a landmark for the city of Paris. It was commissioned by then French president Francois Mitterrand to be built in 1989 by the architect I.M. Pei from New York. The structure, which is constructed entirely of glass segments reaches a height of 70 feet (20.6 meters) and is 115 feet (35 meters) wide at the base. Its construction triggered considerable controversy as many felt this futurist edifice would look out of place in front of the Louvre Museum with its classical architecture but their fears have been proven wrong. The main pyramid is actually only one of several glass pyramids which includes the down-pointing La Pyramide Inversee that functions as a skylight in an underground mall in front of the museum. On March 30, 1989, President Mitterrand lead the first visitors into the Pyramid and the 20-tons of glass built at an estimated cost of 117 million Euros took its rightful role as a maker at the intersection of two walkways of one of the largest, oldest and most important art galleries and museums in the world. It became famous once again when it was used as an important element in the blockbuster movie The De Vinci Code. The website is: www.louvre.fr.

In the premiere issue I introduced you to a long-time friend from Denmark. Now, I’d like to introduce you to his sister, a well-known actress who has been kind enough to tell you about her career and what she finds rewarding about it. We met during the summer of ‘85. I was on my way back to Germany after having finished a photograph exhibition at Mosegard Museum in Arhus. Peter had suggested that I stop and meet his parents who lived right on the train route back to the German border. Peter’s father, by then retired from his medical practice, met me at the train station and drove me to their comfortable home near a watery enclave. Mette was still living at home and agreed to let me take some portrait shots of her at a lovely spot on a sandy beach within walking distance of the house. As I took the pictures, she told me of her dream of becoming a actress, of breaking the mold of following in both her father’s and grandfather’s footsteps by becoming a doctor. And that’s exactly what she did and here’s her story, in her own words:

An actress in Denmark! That’s what I am. I’ve been working as an actress, mostly on the stage, for 15 years now, learning that if you want to survive in this business you have to be able to be: a good theatre/film/TV-actress, a writer, a director, a producer, a speaker, a cartoon-dubber, a dancer, a singer, a teacher, a politician and much, much more. I graduated from the Danish national Theatre School in 1992 after 4 years education. Then, slowly at first, I went through what I call my “free-lance” period in order to get my real education. Now, I do cabaret shows in the summer and more serious Danish drama in the winter along with voice-overs for commercials and cartoons. My career includes a lot of things. Find out more about me and the members of my fellow troupe of improvisation actors at: www.tripleplay.dk. My website is:www.mettemarckmann.dk. Look forward to hearing from you.

1.Eat two pork sandwiches, a side orderof Brunswick stew, and a cup of gritty black coffeeat Foster’s Barbecue hut. Order another cup of coffee to go.

2.Take up your stake-out position in the rear lotof Cooksie’s Texaco station looking out over an unmowedmeadow toward a one-story frame house.

3.Make your coffee last until sunset, letting the lastfew drops go down like chilled linseed oil.

4.Watch as someone drives up and parks parallel to the houseunder the cork elms drooping over the front porch, pausingin the light of the porch light to look up and down thestreet before knocking, looking right up at Cooksie’s for a second.

6.Get out of your car and scamper down the inclinebehind the service station into the meadow besidethe house. Creep around to the back, climb to arickety screened porch, ease your way through theunlatched door. Step up onto an old railway benchto see what you can see.

7.Count yourself lucky that the same loud rockmusic that prevents you from getting any kindof good recording muffles the telltale bumpand creakings of your maneuvers on the bench.

8.Take a couple photographs and step down from the bench,knocking loose as you do a slatfrom the back of the bench, which fallsclattering into an empty metal basin underneath it.

9.Hop through the door and down the dilapidated rearsteps, moon rolling out from behind a cloudto spotlight your getaway. Avoid revealingthe location of your car by heading for adrainage ditch instead of Cooksie’s.

10.Crouching low in the grass, watch the twomen come out onto the porch, down theexterior steps, and into the dewy Septembermeadow. Hear the smaller one shout, “Leaveus alone. Leave us alone!”

Amber Nelson: grew-up in small town Washington. Even though she is now a city girl, she retains a childhood fondness for roller coasters and cows. She is the poetry editor of Alice Blue. Her work can be found online at Dusie and in print at Slightly West. She lives in Seattle, WA. Visit her online at: www.alicbluereview.org

Richard Fein: was a finalist in the 2004 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition and has been published in numerous web and print journals including Touchstone, Windsor Review,Exquisite Corpse, and Paranassus Literary Review. He also has an interest in digital photography. Samples of his photography can be found at: www.pbase.com/bardofbyte.com. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Christine Klocek-Lim: was born in the coal-mining region of northeastern Pennsylvania. She received a BA in Professional writing form Carneige Mellon and has worked as a technical writer in Manhattan. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Lily, Simply Haiku, and elsewhere. In 2006, her poetry was selected as a finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize For Poetry. Her website is: www.novembersky.com.

Ian C. Smith: uses the pen-name of S.M. Chianti. His poetry has appeared in many journals including Best Australian Poetry, Descant, Magma, The Malahat Review, and Meanjin &Westerly. His latest book is Memory Like Hunger (Ginninderra Press). He has a wife and four sons and lives in southeastern Australia, Reach him at: bridge foundation@kilmany.org.au.

Sean Kilpatrick: is a two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee. His poetry and short stories have or will soon appear in over seventy magazines and anthologies including Exquisite Corpse, SnowMonkey, Elimae, 3AM Magazine, andwere, and Unlikely Stories. His first book is forthcoming from Six Gallery press. He lives in Detroit where he is a photography major leaning towards forensics work. His blog features interviews with poets and can be found at: www.anorexicchlorinesextoymuseum.blogspot.com

Wes Magyar: findsinspiration for his paintings from a combination of both personal experience and observations of our culture. His paintings are meant to tell us something. They are meant to be rich with meaning and alluring to the eye. He was the first Denver-based painter to be hosted by Syntax- a denver review. Both his father and brother are painters as well. He received a BA of Fine Arts from the University of Colorado in 1998. He lives in Denver, CO. His website is: www.wesmagyar.com.

Kostas Hrisos: is the founder and editor of Interpoetry online, which began when it took over the very successful Greek and International Poetry website with over 1000 visitors a year. He writes in Greek and English. A collection of his work, In Other Words (2000) received excellent reviews. He is currently finishing the translation of Basil Bunting’s Briggflats. A native of Greece, he has lived in Newcastle, England, since 1975. His literary website is: http://www.interpoetry.com/.

Mette Marckmann: was born in 1967 and grew-up in Sonderborg, Denmark. She studied acting at the National Danish Theatre School from 1988-1992. She made her acting debut at Riddersalem in 1992 and has appeared both on stage and in TV commercials since then but is mainly connected with the theatre. She has also worked with such film directors as Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vintenberg (director of the film Festen/The Party). She has been a member of the board of Danish Actors Association since 2004. She is a wife and mother of two and lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her website is: www.mettemarckmann.dk.

Halvard Johnson: is the editor of Hamilton Stone Review. He admits he has a taxman who doesn’t snicker when he identifies himself as a writer/teacher, even though the amount of money he’s made from writing is roughly equivalent to the amount of money he’s found on sidewalks and in parking lots. He’s used some of it to finance extensive trips to Europe and Asia. He shares an apartment in New York City with his wife Schor, along with all his childhood allergies. They share a website at: www.earthlink.net/~halvard.

Closing Notes: The editor would like to thank the contributors for the use of their work. Each contributor reserves all original rights. The next issue goes online on March 1st. Copyright 2007 by Maurice Oliver. All Rights Reserved.

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I spent much of the 80s working as a freelance photographer in Europe. I returned to America in 1990. Then in 1995, I made a life-long dream come true when I traveled around the world for eight glorious months. Instead of taking pictures, I kept a journal, which eventually led me to what I feel is my "true calling". My poems have appeared in numerous national and international literary magazines both in print and on the web but I still peddle my time as a private tutor, which is not as bad as it sounds. Fact is, I no longer want to live on an iceberg, which is a good thing since they seem to be disappearing.